Master of Reality
I’m sad that there’s only a very narrow window of ages where people had the brain plasticity to master the controls and could really appreciate that game. If you’re too young or too old, it’s actually unplayable. For those lucky few, it was absolutely incredible. Split Screen GoldenEye in 1999 was just off the wall crazy fun.
The first time a fast zombie attacks you in Ravenholm is the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me in a video game.
What have we done 
I think every other boss in the game has some rings before it? Genuinely puzzling decision to exclude them, especially considering that it would still be quite challenging with rings.
The level design of Super Mario 64 is a messy directionless jumble of 3D assets with pasted-on themes.
Freespace 2 is one of my favorite sci-fi stories, and an incredible game. Has shockingly good ongoing mod support, there are tons of high quality, fully voice acted campaigns.
I was into Tribes: Ascend, and feel a lot of fomo about missing out on Tribes 2
I played this for the first time a few months ago, it is gnarly. Incredible art style.
The whitehead remaster’s inclusion of spin dash and elemental shields gives you enough extra tools to make this a pretty fun zone to navigate.
The 1991 version, though… well, I don’t want to break rule #3. I will just suggest that there is an overly high skill floor to navigating Marble Zone quickly.
I would go ahead and open it up and get a coating of superlube 21030 on the cup. You’re not going to break it unless you’re forcing something apart. And prevemptively getting lube on these will dramatically extend their useful life.
Napster was a godsend, as I couldn’t afford to buy music. I installed it on the school computers, and I had a sneaky little hidden folder with my mp3s. I’d plug in my headphones and listen over lunchtime. I eventually figured out how to use multipart rar files to put them onto floppy disks, so that I could get them back home and listen on my parent’s computer. I was eventually able to buy a portable CD player that played mp3s on CD-RW, which really opened up the possibilities. Without piracy, I don’t think I would be into music in the same way - I simple never would have had the opportunity to listen to most stuff.
For me, the Year of Linux on the Desktop was 2021. There’s literally only one computer in the house running Windows anymore, and that’s simply to run some of the pro-level software I use for gig work (and so I’ll never be entirely rid of it).
Proton’s improvements were a big step in transitioning my PC gaming to Linux. There are still a lot of games that won’t run on Linux, but… there are so many that do, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out.
It’s crazy how the subscription based multiplayer on consoles is less reliable than the free multiplayer we get on PC